A Midsummer Night’s Dream

The New Oxford Shakespeare
The New Oxford Shakespeare offers authoritative editions of Shakespeare’s works with introductory materials designed to encourage new interpretations of the plays and poems.
‘I have had a most rare vision.’A Midsummer Night’s Dream evokes images of fairies, dreams, changeling children, and actors being transformed into asses. But is the play as ethereal as these associations suggest? Varsha Panjwani argues that it a rare work of art that is both hilarious and profound, dream and nightmare, submissive and yet subversive. She demonstrates how this play uses dreams as a device to make us examine our reality and the power structures that we have constructed based on class, gender, sexuality, ability, race, nationality, religion, and age. This new edition maps the global appeal of this play and shows how it has inspired various artists around the world and urges readers to participate in the play’s restless question